Facebook Social Search Graph – Just the facts ma’am

Social Search Graph for Facebook

You have come to the right place. Here is what we know so far:

Facebook Social Search Graph will not work like your typical search engine optimization. You will not be able to optimize headlines, keyword density, inbound links, etc. Instead you are searching your users updates and actions. People perform text updates on Facebook all day long so that will be searchable. But people also take actions on Facebook that you will be able to search. And action on Facebook is like a verb in real world. In Facebook you can define actions, and then define who took those actions, and what they did. So “Check In” is an action. That is associated with a person, a location, and a comment. You will likely be able to search actions just like you can search text on Facebook.

One of the more important things that people are not discussing about social search graph: Facebook has a better grasp on meta information than any of the search engines. Google is just now rolling out tags that indicate whether a piece of text is a person, place or a thing. Facebook has had this for awhile. In addition, Facebook also has the verb that the thing/object is doing. That is a very powerful combination, and I’m interested to see how they are going to use it.